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Who Is Dr. Ben Carson?

When he retired last year after three decades of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, Ben Carson bought an organ. Carson has the money to buy a nice one. As he acknowledged in an address at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, he is comfortably in the 1 percent.

Carson, 62, references his financial security regularly. The effect is, in part, to deflect suspicion that he’s trying to cash in as a television commentator (he’s now a Fox News contributor) or as an author (he’s got a new book out next month, One Nation: What We Can All Do To Save America’s Future). Carson has already achieved the highest level of status in medical practice, profited on the boards of Fortune 500 companies and, perhaps most impressively, had a made-for-TV movie about his life in which he was portrayed by Cuba Gooding, Jr. The other half of why Carson talks of his own success and status: He wants you to know that you, and any American, can achieve the same.

But Carson’s organ is languishing. “I think the Good Lord had a different plan,” he said when we met recently.

Last February, Carson delivered a politically charged invocation at the traditionally non-political National Prayer Breakfast. With Barack Obama seated 10 feet to his right, Carson’s prayer transfigured into a 27-minute admonishing of Obamacare. The speech garnered over three million YouTube views in the ensuing 14 months, which have been a barrage of Ben Carson media appearances and speaking engagements as a darling of the right-wing media. “After the prayer breakfast, things just exploded,” Carson said.

In October, Carson made headlines again when he said that the Affordable Care Act’s framework of mandates, insurance exchanges and federal subsidies amounted to “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.” He meant the comparison literally. “It is slavery in a way,” Carson, who is African American, went on, “because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control.”

That sense of loss of control over the practice of medicine is what has brought many doctors recently to become vocal in discussions of policy. Several dozen are even running for Congress this year, most as Republicans.

But it’s Carson who has become one of those curious media stars that often shoots through American politics nowadays—so suddenly popular among conservatives that he bested such 2016 hopefuls as Chris Christie, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio at the CPAC straw poll. Though he does not identify with a political party—he says parties should be dissolved—Carson has spent months speaking to largely GOP audiences, elucidating a deeply Christian, libertarian vision of what the Founding Fathers had in mind. “I began to travel around and see enormous, record-breaking crowds everywhere, that people were just thirsting for common sense,” he told me. “You couple that with the fact that many people feel hopeless, particularly a lot of elderly people who tell me, ‘Until you started talking, I just wanted to die. Because I don’t see America as the land of the free and the home of the brave anymore.’”

Carson has a penchant for this sort of over-the-top sound-bite, and a super PAC has gathered in his honor—the descriptively named the National Draft Ben Carson Committee—that raised nearly $2.4 million in the first three months of the year on behalf of a prospective run for the presidency in 2016. Already the group is running ads and is reportedly in the process of hiring regional directors—all this despite the fact that Carson denies political aspirations. He does, however, think that there ought to be more doctors involved in politics and policy. He likes to mention in his book and speeches that five physicians signed the Declaration of Independence. But unless he receives another call from the good lord, Carson says with a trained furling of the brow, he is simply a concerned citizen. If that’s the extent of it, Ben Carson is one very concerned citizen.